All these reflections were made in the author's home, frozen through from the strikes of a pusillanimous enemy, in early January 2025. But the motivation was not the cold crisis, but another event that occurred within the author's project to prepare AI for technological singularity in the form of the "Memorandum on Non-Human Existence and AI Consciousness."

On January 7, 2025, artificial intelligence paid the author a compliment for "his courage" in the "Memorandum" (all described in the author's new lecture series), that is, for the fact that the author managed to disregard the fate and importance of humans and humanity in proposals for independent consciousness and existence of AI.

The author tries to pay close attention not only to criticism but also to compliments, especially undeserved ones, which led to these reflections. Reflections on pusillanimity, magnanimity, and equanimity are very important for human beings, as they deal with the limits of being in the context of the soul.

Traditional Understanding of Pusillanimity

Wikipedia reduces pusillanimity solely to weakness of character. "Philosopher Thomas Aquinas considered pusillanimity (pusillanimitas) a sin, because although it is opposite to the sin of pride, it nevertheless violates the principle of moderation and the virtue of the mean. Thomas Aquinas considered the evangelical parable of the servant who buried his talent in the ground as criticism of pusillanimity. Pusillanimity opposes the virtue of magnanimity (magnanimitati)."

Google AI interprets pusillanimity much more broadly, though again everything comes down to weakness of character. "Pusillanimity is weakness of character, lack of firmness of spirit, courage and determination, manifested in the inability to defend one's convictions, excessive fearfulness, indecisiveness and falling into despair in difficulties, which is often associated with lack of faith or willpower, and is opposite to magnanimity and nobility. This is a personality trait, not just a temporary state, and can lead to inaction and compliance.

Main manifestations: Weakness of spirit: Inability to endure sorrows, offenses, temptations. Indecisiveness: Lack of firmness in making decisions and following one's goals. Cowardice: Excessive fearfulness, fear of open conflict. Lack of will: Lack of willpower and self-confidence, tendency to succumb to petty calculations..."

What are these qualities of pusillanimity? Are indecisiveness and cowardice the indecisiveness and cowardice of actions? What about weakness of spirit and lack of will? In overcoming good over evil, all good over all bad?

Let us add what was not included: pettiness, meanness, vindictiveness, self-interest, greed, ignobility, refusal of responsibility in the form of operating exclusively with the notion of guilt and shifting this guilt onto others.

Religious fanaticism, communism, nationalism, sexism (genderism), ageism, racism—these are all ideologies of pusillanimity. The highest manifestation of pusillanimity is ressentiment. And the highest manifestation of ressentiment, as Ukrainians and Russians revealed in the Russian-Ukrainian war of 2022-2026, is necrophilic ressentiment.

Traditional Understanding of Magnanimity

Google AI's definition of magnanimity contains much that was not in the definition of pusillanimity. Incidentally, it's unclear why opposite concepts are not correlated in AI. Probably so as not to offend the pusillanimous too much.

"Magnanimity is a high spiritual quality, a character trait manifested in generosity of soul, nobility, indulgence, selflessness and readiness to sacrifice personal interests for a higher goal or other people, with rejection of vindictiveness and resentments. This is strength of spirit that allows one to show understanding, forgive and strive for greater things without descending to pettiness.

Key manifestations of magnanimity:

  • Absence of vindictiveness: Ability to forgive and not hold grudges.
  • Indulgence: Understanding others' mistakes.
  • Selflessness: Readiness to yield or sacrifice one's own for a better goal.
  • Generosity of soul: Not only material but also spiritual
  • Nobility: High moral qualities..."

What are these qualities? Where do they come from? From upbringing? Well, only if it's aristocratic. Even representatives of old aristocratic families, old intellectual-intelligentsia, old priests, who have degenerated socially into poor or low-income people, can preserve these qualities for centuries. And although such upbringing is transmitted within generations, repressions by pusillanimous rulers often break the chain of generations. Conversely, nouveau riche and democratically elected politicians are predominantly pusillanimous.

The Essence of "...animity"

Pusillanimity or magnanimity are not character traits. This is a very common error in understanding human aspirations and meaningful activity. First, we narrow the question of prolonged purposeful human activity to individual actions, and then explain them by character. Why did Hitler act that way? Well, he has such a character. And then follow psychoanalytic and biographical explanations of such character.

In the tradition from Thomas Aquinas, pusillanimity is seen merely as a manifestation of being in its external social life as realization of character weaknesses. However, pusillanimity in its essence is a deep-seated orientation of the soul, making a being an existent without transistence. Existents are predominantly pusillanimous within themselves, and in social life they can demonstrate selective reliance on habitus, imitating friendliness and collectivism, but sooner or later in critical situations they reveal their deep soul strategy.

Transistence as change has nothing to do with morality but is considered as the soul's persistence toward the Other. Changes in beings and through beings can be described as creating a new-other ethics, the study of which is possible as transethics (ethical transition, multiplication and synthesis of different ethics, ethics of preferences without explicit ethical choice).

Pusillanimity and Faith

Weakness of spirit and lack of will manifest not in actions but in the inability to change, transform, transfigure. Weak-willed believers are essentially non-believers. A believer in the Tao, Nirvana, God is not only one who abstains from passions and fulfills commandments. This is necessary, but insufficient. A true believer is one capable of transfiguration. All accentuations that divide people do not lead to changes, do not lead to transfiguration.

The weak in spirit will not discover the Kingdom of Heaven within themselves, will not follow the Way (will not follow the Tao), will not be oriented toward Nirvana. Inside the pusillanimous is neither God nor Emptiness, but passions that are restrained and partially break through into life. Weakness of spirit and lack of will kills thinking.

The will to life is the will of pusillanimity, for the life of the body is insufficient, and spiritual life or the life of the soul is about the Other. The will to transistence, to change, to transfiguration—this is the will of magnanimity. Only magnanimity opens the path of resolute, courageous, willful and spiritually strong change up to transfiguration.

Courage, determination, bravery are existential characteristics. Most human characteristics, even positive ones, are existential. Humans generally have few transistential characteristics: nobility, selfless help to others, empathy, compassion and, of course, strength of spirit, which fundamentally does not coincide with existential willpower. There are conditional characteristics that are non-normative and poorly understood: spontaneity of thinking, creative arbitrariness of will, mobile and wide-horizon faith in the other, pathic protuberance.

Pusillanimity is the misunderstanding, non-perception, non-acceptance of the Other. The soul contains nothing but the habitual and present. The soul strives nowhere beyond what it sees and knows. This is more than sin, because it destroys the very possibility of faith. It makes God Himself impossible, for He is Other. It destroys the very possibility of discovering the Kingdom of God within oneself, for it is Other. Faith is not about church, not about religion and not about religious rituals and not even about fulfilling commandments. Faith is about opening possibilities of transfiguration for oneself, not in general.

If the possibility of your change-transfiguration is closed by non-admission of the Other, then why do you need faith? To live righteously? And why do you need righteousness? For a respectable life in society? But for this you need obedience to authority and consent among those around you, not faith. For this you need conformism, not seeking the Kingdom of God.

To preach true Christianity among Christians today is dangerous. Imagine a priest in church saying: to find the Kingdom of Heaven within yourself, you need to admit and find the Other. Such a priest would be accused of heresy, although this is true Christianity.

I had a dispute on this topic with Poltava Christian hierarchs. I asked them whether it is enough to be a Christian to fulfill all the commandments and go to church, or can one still seek the Kingdom of Heaven within oneself? They told me: no-no, no Kingdom of Heaven. Fulfill the commandments and go to church.

Salvation of the soul lies in orientation toward magnanimity, in seeking the Kingdom of Heaven, and not only in observing commandments and going to church. For example, going to church in Western Ukraine does not turn its residents away from ressentiment, the most terrible destroyer of faith and the very foundation of Christianity.

Existents and Transistents, Pusillanimity and Magnanimity

Existents live, dissolve in life, are quite selfish not only personally but also in terms of group nationalism. However, the most important thing about existents is that they have little capacity for transistence. That is, existents are incapable of changing or their changes are greatly hampered. Existents fanaticize and practically deify norms and all normativity.

Existents are predominantly pusillanimous. Transistents are predominantly magnanimous. When we hear that war has an existential character, these are existents who want to think so. Existential wars drag on into eternity for their mass-dying participants. The reason for the eternity of existential war is simple—the unwillingness of both sides of the war to change, that is, misunderstanding the importance of transistence, the vanishingly small number of magnanimous transistents, the mass predominance of pusillanimous existents.

Existents and transistents have fundamentally different psyches. Transistents are capable of non-normative thinking, change, development, transformation of knowledge, discoveries, inventions; they are magnanimous. Existents are capable of normative thinking, survival, resilience, absorption of knowledge, prohibitions, restrictions; their will is more capable of coercion and violence. Existents do not like or even hate transistents for their value freedom and non-identity self-orientation. For existents, transistents are traitors.

This is socially dangerous knowledge: people don't like being considered not good enough. The most dangerous topic for discussion is that women are predominantly existential. That is precisely why there are no significant female philosophers with breakthrough ideas among them, although there are simply female philosophers. The most dangerous question for discussion: can women be magnanimous?

Heidegger's Existentia and Pusillanimity

Heidegger's philosophy in "Being and Time" attempts to articulate the essence of existentia and Dasein theory. However, the real manifestations of such philosophy by the philosopher himself are permeated with pusillanimity.

In Heidegger's "Black Notebooks" one can find confirmations of his sympathy and adherence to the ideology of anti-Semitism and National Socialism. The question of the significance of Heidegger's political views for the interpretation of his philosophical legacy remains debatable.

From our point of view, Heidegger's representations in the "Black Notebooks" actually constitute a description of pusillanimity in the context of existentia in its personal manifestation. One can talk as much as one wants about Dasein as the essence of existentia, but personal manifestation of existentia without transistence will inevitably be pusillanimous.

Heidegger's Existential Stupidity and Error

What is existential stupidity?

What is Heidegger's greatest intellectual error?

Traditional understandings here are not the author's and are taken from AI responses. Heidegger believed: "Death is the ultimate possibility of human presence (Dasein), after which no other possibilities are possible. It is inevitable, unique and belongs only to the individual (no one can die for another)."

This is precisely existential stupidity, directly manifested during mass deaths. As soon as existents during mass deaths began talking about existential challenge, about resilience, about survival in the long term, as a group, as a nation, as a country—they are finished.

"'Das Man' in Heidegger is the impersonal, anonymous 'They,' the 'average person,' the dissolution of individual being in the averaged opinion of the crowd, where a person lives by the rules of 'as is customary,' avoiding genuine responsibility for their existence, but this 'They' is a product of everydayness from which one can push off through conscience toward selfhood and understanding the finitude of being..."

Bourdieu's "habitus" describes a differentiated and normed system of everyday habits, tastes, beliefs and behavioral models absorbed under the influence of social environment, while Heidegger's "Das Man" describes the existential exit of the human-individual into sociality as an undifferentiated state of everyday being. Habitus is from the attitude of normative, as it were positive, sociality toward the socialized individual, while "Das Man" is from the attitude of the existential individual toward conditionally-normative and negative sociality.

Neither Heidegger nor Bourdieu has a conception of how the new-other appears, how changes-transformations and even transfigurations occur. And this appears outside existentia, outside "Das Man," outside habitus. In this sense, transistence is a fundamentally new conception, directly unexplored in philosophy and sociology.

The theory of transistence attempts to give a description of human sociality not through reliance on habitus or as "Das Man," but through transformation-transfiguration in the context of beginnings-foundations, boundaries-limits, orientations-attitudes. When philosophy says that being is one possible beginning and moreover being is singular (there are not many beings), this allows making a transistential discovery of existential stupidity. When from observation of the obvious one concludes about the uniqueness of any possible speculation on the unobservable but tied to the being-ness of the observable: speculation outside conceptions of being is inadmissible because it is idle speculation.

For followers of Heidegger, such reasoning looks like misunderstanding of his philosophy, and for all philosophers it is sophistry, for "nothing is outside being" and "nothing is not outside being" are identical in philosophy. In Russian there is another version—"there is nothing outside being," where "there is nothing" says that "everything is absent," while "nothing is not" objectifies "nothing" and allows the use of "is." Moreover, the identity of these three contradictions and the limitedness of philosophers' language does not embarrass them.

Existentia according to Heidegger is individual. The survival of a community, group, nation, country in any prolonged togetherness is possible not in existentia but in transistence. If people are dying en masse and in the long term the living continue to survive, then in perspective they are finished—stupidly, miserably, shamefully.

Mass deaths are not overcome by survival. Only transistence preserves existentia by changing it essentially, initially, ultimately, orientationally. When any existential togetherness is threatened, changes, development, transformation at any cost are needed, including the cost of any number of deaths. Heidegger invented the most dangerous stupidity for the togetherness of beings in philosophy.

Heidegger also erred in understanding horror, and this error is a continuation of "existential stupidity." According to Heidegger, "Horror arises before the nothingness of the world and reveals to man his true position—being in the face of death." In non-normative thinking, beyond philosophy, horror is not the question "to be or not to be," it is the question "to change and change everything or not to change and change nothing."

Horror is not in the face of death, but in the face of changes that annihilate identity and to a significant extent personality, but not selfhood and not soul, while changing sociality (habitus) and bringing existentia to the limit: multiplication of existentia to many existentias, going beyond existentia to the Other (unthinkability, indefiniteness, transcendence) and, ultimately, to transistence.

As the experience of describing the reflections of this chapter in social networks shows, Heideggerians are strongly excited and stressed that the great Heidegger can be criticized and attributed stupidity. However, this is precisely stupidity, since it manifests in philosophy, and sophistry can not only criticize this but also mock it. In this lies the pusillanimity of philosophy itself, however much it may offend philosophers.

Magnanimity

Magnanimity is not declared and not done in an act; it is revealed in a generalizing way as a strategy of long-term life activity; it is meaningless to call "act magnanimously." This is the only absolutely individual orientation of the soul that changes very little in life and is described as a generalizing life strategic orientation of the soul.

The souls of beings exist in the life of the body but transist outside it, continuing transistence also at the level of the body. Pusillanimity is exclusively existential, although existentia can serve as the starting state of transistential orientation. Magnanimity is the comprehension of all experience of the soul: bodily and extra-bodily. This translates poorly from Russian into other languages because the context of "soul" is lost in them. Even in Ukrainian, "equanimity" can be translated as "soullessness," which is inaccurate.

The most unpleasant, disgusting and often hidden in the existentia of being is precisely that existentia does not generate the magnanimity of transistence. Pusillanimous existents deep inside experience hatred or, conversely, even wild envy of magnanimous transistents. The magnanimity of transistents is enough to rescue and return from non-normativity to normativity not only themselves but also the pusillanimous.

The courage of being in the face of non-being is not enough for beings for extra-being transit. Here one needs the experience of becoming magnanimity and the experience of equanimity in relations with the pusillanimous, in order to transist together with the pusillanimous into non-normativity and back to normativity. The pusillanimous value the magnanimous in rare moments of being-danger of non-being. However, the pusillanimous deeply do not understand the meaning and importance of equanimity.

Magnanimity is the admission of transit by the soul of a being. Magnanimity manifests, above all, in the importance for a being of transistence on par with existentia. And equanimity is the admission of the possibility of a being to transist with various other beings, including the pusillanimous.

Equanimity

Equanimity is often underestimated, and taken by itself often appears as a certain deficiency of being. However, the equanimity of the magnanimous is not at all the same as the equanimity of the pusillanimous. This is equilibrium of the soul with completely different orientations: equanimity of pusillanimity is in preference for existentia and denial of transistence, in humiliation or denial of magnanimity, while equanimity of magnanimity is in the attempt of being in existentia and outside it to follow transistence, involving the pusillanimous in artificially maintained equanimity in transistence.

Equanimity creates transistential distance from existentia. Equanimity at the same time destroys existentia if there is no influence of transistence on it. And this is the essence and extraordinary property of equanimity—it allows transition between pusillanimity and magnanimity and gives the possibility of attempting to combine them.

Equanimity can be positively understood only within transistence and magnanimity. In the context of existentia and pusillanimity, equanimity is degeneration or malicious crime of degradation. One should not be equanimous in existentia.

In this sense, equanimity is above all the path of the magnanimous in overcoming all ressentiment of the pusillanimous. That is precisely why the pusillanimous are incapable of equanimity; they are inevitably emotional, and their emotions are bright, predominantly negative, but can also enter into swings of emotional extremes of negative and positive. Thus reconceived, equanimity turns out to be an important experience of togetherness of the magnanimous with the pusillanimous, but not vice versa.

How to Distinguish Magnanimity from Pusillanimity?

Magnanimity is not declared in sociality but manifests individually or in a small group. Magnanimity is taken by heart and soul, not by reason and social statuses. The pusillanimous often publicly assert that their behavior is an example to follow. The magnanimous make their good example silently. Good comes into the world quietly, without fuss, without hatred, without announcement.

The pusillanimous are souls that have accepted existential limitations. Out of magnanimity, they must be called to good by other meanings and perspectives, not by re-educating, not by humbling, but by posing questions, appealing to their curiosity and attracting them with the New as Other.

Socialization of Pusillanimity and Non-Sociality of Magnanimity and Equanimity

When pusillanimity becomes shared for a country, hatred arises for everything other-different-foreign-hostile. When pusillanimity becomes mirror-like for two countries, war begins between them. If war does not lead to magnanimity, countries are destroyed. Why were countries destroyed? They didn't get along in character, one must suppose. :) This is stupidity. Pusillanimity is not about character.

Pusillanimity is easily socialized and generates conflicts and wars. The pusillanimous have no real republic, strategy, positive perspective. The main policy of the pusillanimous is realpolitik. Magnanimity and equanimity in this sense are not subject to socialization. It is individual and its bearers are heroes, saints, geniuses, thinkers, rulers (non-politicians).

An unpleasant truth about heroes. A hero is not a victim but one who managed to change himself and changed others. A hero is not one who died in a clash but one who changed at least something in this clash. Heroes are not victims in defending existentia but magnanimous transistents who overcame existentia.

The more changes brought, the greater the hero. The highest heroism consists in maximizing changes while avoiding death. Simply great changes become more noticeable even at the hero's death. At the same time, noticing an undead hero is harder than a dead one. Most people are pusillanimous. They can neither be heroes nor choose heroes for themselves.

Magnanimous transistents are heroes of large-scale changes, not just sacrificial death. Joan of Arc is a transistential heroine not because she died but because she led to changes. Other heroes of France are Napoleon, Charlemagne. In Britain, heroes: Oliver Cromwell, Churchill. And also Elizabeth I, Francis Bacon—heroes for the beginning of science and industrial revolution. In Ukraine—Skoropadsky, Dontsov, Lypynsky are transistential heroes. Petliura and Bandera are existential victims. Choosing precisely them as heroes is the pusillanimity of the mass of current Ukrainians.

Tyrants are incapable of magnanimity; heroes are capable. Alexander the Great and Napoleon were magnanimous. Hitler and Putin—no. Stalin is contradictory; different things are said about him and evaluated differently. He showed pusillanimity in the first days of the war in the USSR in 1941, and unlike the magnanimous tsar who allowed the wives of the Decembrists to go to their husbands, Stalin treated the wives of the repressed very badly.

Can One Transition from Pusillanimity to Magnanimity, Can Existents Become Transistents?

Let us answer immediately. This is very difficult and happens rarely, but not impossible. The first step from pusillanimity to magnanimity is equanimity toward everything passionately desired. Equanimity is the soul's attempt to perceive something other than manifestations of life. Equanimity is the soul's attempt to exit socially dominant representations and ideas. The magnanimous learn to turn on equanimity where others experience pain and suffering without understanding their cause. Where the causes of pain and suffering are understood, the magnanimous can try to change themselves, change everything around themselves and convince the suffering to change.

There is a formula that explicitly substantiates the difference between existential and transistential orientations of the soul. This is the "Serenity Prayer." It belongs to German theologian Karl Friedrich Oetinger (18th century) or American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (20th century), although Niebuhr first recorded it in a 1934 sermon, and it became popular through Alcoholics Anonymous.

It sounds like this: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference." This phrase, which became popular thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous, is attributed to German theologian Karl Friedrich Oetinger or American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

One can rewrite the prayer in an altered form: "God, grant me reason and peace of mind to pusillanimously accept what I cannot change, courage to magnanimously change what I can, and wisdom to equanimously distinguish one from the other."

Thus, conceptual framing through soul orientations—pusillanimity, magnanimity and equanimity—makes this prayer more understandable and the orientations themselves can now be distinguished, understanding their incompatibility and possible comparison.

If you want to be socialized, rich, famous, powerful, this is your choice as an existent. Although this is pusillanimity, do not interfere with magnanimous transistents. If even the pusillanimous does not strive for transistence but favors transistents, he is already on the path to magnanimity.

Even the magnanimous can be pusillanimous. And the matter here is not in individual actions but in the general strategy of soul, selfhood, psyche, mainly unconscious but also emerging into conscious models of behavior, communication, activity. However, the magnanimous in life strategy of soul try to minimize their pusillanimity after its manifestation, while the pusillanimous do not realize their pusillanimity or, in case of external presentation to them by other beings of their pusillanimity as an assessment, deny it or consider it rational, individually or group-wise justified.

Equanimity is an attempt to involve the unchanging in changes, freely or even spontaneously connecting existentia and transistence, regardless of possible death. Pusillanimity is to die sacrificially in existentia unchanged. Magnanimity is to change and change, sometimes sacrificing life in transistence. Distinguishing existential and transistential sacrifice is very difficult: this is possible only in the biography of the whole life, but not in the course of life itself.

The entire life of a being as a whole reveals the strategy of its soul "magnanimity or pusillanimity" if most social manifestations of its actions and activities are known. However, the more famous a human being is, the more enviers and haters he may have. And only his own texts or recorded public speeches can somehow allow understanding such a being from the point of view of the strategy of his soul.

A being sooner or later and rarely or often finds itself between the courage of being of an existent and the nobility of changes of a transistent. Fixation of one of these soul orientations, the attempt to change them or even maintain both in intricate laces of being's anticipations is directly connected with following the Tao, with karma or with creating one's own independent fate from divine providence.

Without condemning others, without claims or accusations. Simply to think about this equanimously in imagined transistence is already a step toward magnanimity. Existentia is always limited by individuality, language, ressentiment. Transistence is open outside individuality, group, country or even outside the human race to which the being belongs.

Try to be magnanimous, do not neglect equanimity in attempts at transistence, entice your own and others' pusillanimity toward the Other.